Scapegoating Newsweek

 

Senior Bush administration officials are outraged that Newsweek magazine apparently was misled by a previously reliable source into publishing an erroneous statement that helped to spark anti-American riots in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"Our image abroad has been damaged," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. The story "has done a lot of harm" to this country's efforts to reach out to the Muslim world, according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And those comments were mild by comparison with the tirades emanating from the blogosphere, where critics accused Newsweek of overt anti-military bias - or worse.

Newsweek, which retracted the article on Monday, made an embarrassing and consequential mistake. But its harshest critics are denying the obvious. What damaged this country's image abroad was its own well-documented abuse of detainees in the war on terrorism, not one magazine's flawed reporting on one element of the abuse.

On May 1, Newsweek carried a brief report in its "Periscope" section about the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay , Cuba . According to the item - prepared by two highly respected journalists, Michael Isikoff and John Barry - U.S. military investigators had confirmed that an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Quran down a toilet.

The anonymous source of that information later backtracked and claimed to be unsure of its validity. By that time, the magazine item had touched off violent protests in Afghanistan , Pakistan and elsewhere. Seventeen people died.

In relying on a single unnamed source and claiming to know what a forthcoming report was "expected" to say, the magazine obviously was on shaky ground. But it's disingenuous for critics to assert that Newsweek "caused" rioting and deaths elsewhere in the world. Radical Islamists obviously used the item to stir up anti-American violence; the rioters, not the magazine, are responsible for their actions.

And while Newsweek was wrong to claim that military investigators had confirmed the incident, numerous other sources have reported over the past two years that guards at Gitmo have flushed, kicked, and otherwise conveyed disrespect for the Quran. Official records from Abu Ghraib and other locations indicate that the abuse of Islam is nothing new for American interrogators, who have forced inmates to eat pork, poured liquor down their throats and heaped obscenities and abuse on their religious beliefs, among other tactics.

No one has stepped forward to declare that the Quran incident is a fiction. More generally, no one can pretend any longer that the U.S. military simply would not engage in abuse and torture - not after the conviction of several participants in the Abu Ghraib atrocities, at least two dozen deaths attributed to torture, and plain evidence that the White House condones tactics prohibited by the Geneva Conventions when dealing with "unlawful combatants."

After all that, do Bush administration officials and their allies really believe that a magazine has damaged America 's standing in the world? The Newsweek report could provoke such fierce reaction only because the past actions of the United States had made the allegations credible.

The American government diminishes this country's standing in the world, and its capacity to wage war against terrorism, when it resorts to physical and mental cruelty against detainees. That's an outrage. Don't blame the media for trying, however imperfectly, to shine a light on it.

© 2005 Daily Camera

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